Q1. Conventions

Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real products?


For my coursework, i have produced opening title sequence for a thriller genre film.


Conventions of openings:

Here are some of the things we expect to see in the opening of a film and also in a thriller opening, in written form.

• The location set 
• Introduce characters; the protagonist, as they could be a general person
• Tension building, this can be done through camera work
• Camera work; jump cuts, over the shoulder, close up, high+low angle shot
• Title of the film, from previous research we found that it comes 7th
• Title sequences/ Distribution Icon & Title.

This video (filmed with Camtasia) explains what we expect to see in the conventional opening of a film, also, in our sub genre 'psychological thriller'.





Below shows two pieces of real media that i researched earlier this year.

 As you can see the shots taken from our thriller film are quite similar to Seven. Generally in film openings the titles usually appear on screen for 3 to 4 seconds long. This is another convention we followed  Every time a new title appears on the screen it matches the sound track used. Throughout the majority of the film, the music drops, and with that, a new title appears on screen.

Our group aimed to have as much Intertextuality with the film 'Seven' as possible,  so  because seven had its  film name on a black screen, we used Intertextuality in that way also and this is shown in the picture below. Also, Sevens film title comes near enough 7th , if not seventh  in the title sequence order and we used Intertextuality here also.

If I were to compare our film opening to another film opening, I will say its quite similar to seven. This is what we were originally intending to do, so i think our efforts were a great success.